and in the next he defends the
Socialists supporting a coalition government. How can one subscribe
to the doctrine of the class struggle and at the same time approve
of Socialists joining in a coalition government, which of necessity
will not be the agent of the workers but of the class with which
the workers are at all times at war?....

"In all our official declarations, including the Chicago manifesto,
we have voiced our support of the Bolsheviki. In our meetings and
in our literature we have taken our stand solidly with our Russian
Comrades, our friends, the Left Wingers to the contrary
notwithstanding.

"Why, then, hesitate to affiliate with them?"

Thus, whether or not Berger's policy of dissimulation prevailed--and his
wholesale slaughter of dues-payers with the ax of the Executive
Committee had shown all who opposed him what they might expect--it
remained true that identification with the Bolshevist principles and
tactics of Lenine and Trotzky was what the present members of the
Socialist Party in America "have professed and believed in during the
past critical years" and was in accord with "all" their "official
declarations," their "meetings" and their "literature."

The base ingratitude of Berger toward those who have followed and
supported him; the gross, incredible savagery of his egotism in turning
to rend those he had discipled into revolutionaries the moment their
allegiance to the principles he taught them stood in the way of his
cowardice and ambition; his butcher insensibilities in making his
party's Constitution a "scrap of paper" and the party a shambles for the
hewing down of two-thirds of his "Comrades;" his burlesque effrontery in
posing in the convention as a law-and-order man, railing at his own
victims as "anarchists"--these daubs of color paint the cubist portrait
of Wisconsin's mock hero, one of the meanest caricatures of human life
that ever swaggered on a political arena.

When the two Wings of the Convention raised the question, "Who called
the cops?" Berger's pale and innocent figure rose with the trembling
remark: "If they had not been here yesterday morning we would not be
here now. The two-fisted Reed and the other two-fisted Left Wingers
would be here." He took pains to have the delicate pathos of his
martyrdom sketched into the Executive Committee report he signed,
"Victor L. Berger, in addition to a sentence of 20 years, h